Chapter 1: The Safehouse
The vibration buzzed against the scarred pine of the nightstand, a frantic insect trapped under glass. Lo didn’t need to look. The third burner phone this month. Only one person ever called.
She let it ring, the sound swallowed by the dense silence of the Wisconsin pines pressing against the cabin walls. Outside, the last of the autumn light was a cold, thin syrup bleeding through the boarded windows. The air inside smelled of pine tar, of the lavender oil she’d spilled yesterday, and beneath it, something older. Whiskey.Leather. The ghost of men who were never gentle.
The ringing stopped. A beat of blessed quiet. Then the buzz of a text.
A laugh punched out of her—short, dry, utterly without humor. She rolled onto her back on the thin mattress, staring at the water stain blooming on the ceiling like a map of a country she’d never visit.
The free-lance gig at the Bend & Breathe studio in town covered the rent on this shithole. It was enough. It had to be enough.Two months. Sixty-three days of watching her back in grocery store aisles, of jumping at the rumble of a motorcycle that wasn’t his, of feeling the phantom weight of a hand on the back of her neck. Two months of almost believing she could outrun her own heartbeat.
The phone buzzed again. Another text. She snatched it up, her thumb smearing the greasy screen.
Unknown: Cold up there, kid. You’re gonna catch a chill in that little shack. Heard the mice are throwing parties.
Her breath fogged in the chill air. She typed, her fingers clumsy with cold and something else.
Lo: I like mice. Better conversationalists.The reply was instant.
Unknown: They’re stealing your food, Rabbit.
A shiver, hot and cold at once, raced down her spine. Rabbit. His name for her when she was running. She could see him, clear as if he were leaning against the doorjamb, filling it with his shoulders. The zero-fade crop. The ink on his knuckles. That look in his blue eyes—equal parts amusement and absolute certainty.
Lo: I’m not coming back.
Three dots pulsed.pulsed.pulsed.
Unknown: Wasn’t asking, baby girl. Just telling you to pack warm.See you soon.
She threw the phone. It hit the wall with a plastic crack and skittered under the rusty cast-iron stove. Silence rushed back in, louder than before. She pulled her knees to her chest, the rough wool of her sweater scratching her chin. Defiant.Witty. Playful. The words she used to describe herself felt like costume jewelry now, cheap and thin.
The cabin groaned around her. It was a desperate place, half-swallowed by the forest, its gray siding peeling like old skin. She’d chosen it for that, for the way it seemed to reject the world. She’d lit a candle, spilled her lavender oil, tried to imprint her own peace onto the stubborn gloom. But the gloom had fought back. It was in the faded club patches nailed to the wall by a previous tenant, the colors bleached to ghosts. It was in the single, oversized leather-bound book on the bare shelf, left open to a dog-eared page she hadn’t dared to read. It was in the fire pit outside, rusted and choked with the bones of last year’s leaves.He was coming.
The knowledge was a stone in her gut. He always came. Every time she bolted—to Chicago, to a shitty apartment in Milwaukee, to this forgotten corner of the woods—he eventually showed up. Not angry.Never angry. That was the worst part. He’d show up with that magnetic, chaotic calm of his, a smirk playing on his lips, and he’d look at her like she’d left the oven on, not his entire world. He’d drag her back, not with violence, but with the unbearable weight of his possession. His affection was a cage with velvet-lined bars.
And she kept running, because the alternative—surrendering to that, to the part of her that craved the stability of his strength, the brutal honesty of his command—terrified her more than any consequence.
A branch snapped outside.
Lo was on her feet in a fluid, silent motion, her yoga-trained body coiled. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. She moved to the window, peering through a gap where the boarding had warped.Nothing. Just the deep purple shadows of the pines, and the first few stars pinpricking the cold sky.Paranoia. It had to be paranoia.
But paranoia had kept her alive more times than she could count. She shoved her feet into her boots, not bothering with the laces, and grabbed her jacket. The faded patches on the wall seemed to watch her. She yanked the door open, the cold biting into her lungs.
The porch sagged under her weight. The world outside was immense and quiet, the only sound the sigh of wind in the treetops. She walked to the edge of the clearing, her breath pluming, and looked down the single-lane road that curled away into darkness.Empty.
A laugh bubbled up, tinged with hysteria. Of course it was empty. He was in New York, or on the road, or in some chapterhouse bar. He wasn’t here.Not yet. His texts were just psychological warfare, and she was letting him win from three states away.
She turned to go back inside, to fish the broken phone from under the stove, maybe even to light a fire in that damn useless pit.
The low rumble started so softly she thought it was the wind at first. Then it deepened, crystallized—a sound felt in the teeth more than heard. A motorcycle. Not just any motorcycle. The specific, tectonic growl of a modified Harley.
It wasn’t on the road. It was coming through the trees.
Her blood turned to ice water. He’d never come through the trees before.Lo ran. Not toward the cabin, but around it, into the thicker woods behind. The boots were clumsy on the wet, needle-strewn ground. Branches clawed at her jacket. She didn’t look back. The roar of the engine was everywhere, shattering the silent night, coming closer, closer.
She tripped over a root, went down hard on one knee, gasping. She scrambled behind the thick, gnarled trunk of an ancient pine, pressing her back against the bark. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to quiet her heaving breaths.
The engine cut. The sudden silence was a shock. Then, the crunch of boots on gravel. Slow. Deliberate.
“Olivia.”
His voice. Gritty New York, rough with amusement. It wasn’t a shout. It was a statement, carrying through the cold air as if he were right beside her.
She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
“You know how long it took me to find this place?” he called out, conversational. “Two days. The guy at the yoga studio folds easier than a cheap suit. You’re paying too much for this shithole, by the way. The roof’s fucked.”
A pinecone dropped somewhere to her left. She flinched.
A pinecone dropped somewhere to her left.She flinched.
It wasn't Bill.
She didn’t need to turn to know. The pitch was wrong, the cadence flatter, a Wisconsin drawl stretching the vowels thin. But the voice was familiar—a member from the Club she didn’t have time to identify. The thrill of near-capture snapped into a different, colder fear. Bill sent one of his boys. A blunt instrument. He was outsourcing her retrieval.
The boots crunched closer, stopping near the front of the cabin. “C’mon, Lo. We ain’t gotta do this the hard way. Bill just wants to talk.”
She pictured Rab’s face—flat, humorless, hands like cured hams. He didn’t have Bill’s perverse sense of theater. He had a job. And he’d break the cabin door down to finish it.
She took off running towards the town.
Her legs burned, the un-laced boots flapping, but the adrenaline made her a creature of pure motion. She tore through the underbrush, ignoring the branches that snatched at her clothes and hair. Behind her, the bike roared to life, a throaty bellow of frustration. The headlight cut through the trees, a swinging, malevolent eye painting her fleeing shape in stark bursts. She was a rabbit flushed from cover, and he was the hound.
But she knew these woods. She’d walked them for two months, tracing deer paths, memorizing the fallen giants. She cut sharp left, vaulted over a mossy log, and hit a narrow deer trail that ran parallel to the road. The bike couldn’t follow here. Its thunder receded, circling, looking for an opening.
She stumbled into Mosinee City’s alleyways, the world abruptly shifting from pine-scented darkness to the harsh, sodium-yellow glow of municipal lighting. The back of a hardware store, dumpsters overflowing, the grimy brick walls tattooed with faded graffiti. She pressed herself into a doorway recess, the cold brick biting through her jacket. Her lungs screamed, hauling in air that tasted of frozen grease and wet asphalt.
Silence.
The bike hadn’t found her, yet.
She listened, every muscle taut. A car hissed by on the slushy main street. A dog barked in the distance. No engine growl. She pulled up her hoodie, tucking her dark waves inside, and stepped out, falling into the loose, unhurried walk of someone with nowhere to be. She crossed the street, head down, hands shoved deep in her pockets.
Her phone buzzed against her thigh. A jolt of pure electricity shot up her spine. She ducked into another alcove, a recessed shop doorway selling antiques she’d never looked at, and fished the cracked burner from her pocket.
Unknown number: Knew my girl’d be too smart to get nabbed by Rab. Keep it up baby, me and the boys got bets going.
She stared at the words until the screen dimmed.Shit. She thought he’d bought off Club members, sent his enforcers. This was worse. He’d turned it into a game for the whole chapter. A wager. How many would he send? When would he show up himself? Double shit, some had his patience—when he chose to have it. Others didn’t. Rab didn’t.
Fuck it.
She hit call on the unknown number, marching back out into the snowy streets. The melted slush seeped into her untied boots, a cold shock with every step. She didn’t care. The anger was a live wire inside her, hot and crackling.
He answered on the second ring. The background noise was wind, the open road. He was outside, somewhere cold.
“Sup, baby.”
His voice was a gravel-road rumble, effortless, intimate. It wrapped around her, a familiar trap.
“You’re an asshole!” she hissed, keeping her voice low as she passed a couple leaving a diner, their laughter slicing the night.
“Yeah, I know baby, you done, you had enough, you want something of your own I know, the spiel’s on repeat in my head.” The chuckle that followed was warm, genuinely amused. It made her want to scream. He was picturing her face.He always was.
She growled, turning deeper into the city, away from the brighter main drag towards the quieter residential grids. “Go home, Bill. I’m not doing this with you!”
“Doin’ what, exactly? Checkin’ on my favorite person? Makin’ sure she’s warm?” The wind noise dropped. He’d stopped. Maybe pulled over. “Rab just wanted to say hi. Invite you for a coffee.”
“Bullshit.” Her breath came in white plumes. “Call off your dogs. The bet’s off. I’m not your goddamn quarry.”
“The boys need the distraction. Business has been tense.” His tone shifted, a fraction. The playful edge hardening into something real. “You’re safer where I can see you, Lo. This ain’t a philosophical debate.”
“I’m safe here,” she spat, but the words sounded hollow even to her. Safe in a boarded-up cabin with a stove that didn’t work. Safe with Rab hunting her through the pines.
“You’re in a town with one traffic light, surrounded by woods you don’t own, with people who don’t know you. That ain’t safe. That’s alone. There’s a difference.” He paused, and she could hear him lighting a cigarette, the faint click of the Zippo. “And you hate being alone.”
It was the truth. It was the deepest, most shameful truth of her, and he wielded it like a knife, not to cut, but to pry her open. The chaotic family of the Club, the relentless noise of the clubhouse, his overwhelming presence—it was a cage, but it was never, ever lonely.
“I’m building something,” she said, the defiance leaking out, replaced by a weariness that went to the bone.
“I know you are, kid. I read your website. ‘Somatic therapy for embodied peace.’ Sounds real nice.” He took a drag, exhaled. “You can build it at home. Build whatever you want. But you’re buildin’ it where I can keep the wolves from your door. Even the ones you can’t see.”
“I am not,” she said, her voice dropping to a fierce whisper, “coming back to be your kept woman. Your pretty little submissive who bolts every six months for your entertainment. I’m done with the cycle, Bill. It’s degrading.”
The line was quiet for so long she thought he’d hung up. Then his voice came back, lower, stripped of all humor. “You think that’s what it is? Entertainment?”
“What else would you call it? The chase?The capture? The big, bad Sergeant-at-Arms hauling his wayward property back to the compound?”
“I call it love, Olivia.” He said it plainly, a simple statement of fact. It stole the air from her lungs. “My fucked-up, hard-headed, only-way-I-know-how love.You run. I bring you home. That’s the deal we made, the day you decided to walk into my world and start rearranging the furniture in my head. You don’t get to renegotiate the terms by disappearin’ into the fuckin’ North Woods.”
Tears, hot and sudden, pricked her eyes. She hated them. She blinked furiously, turning a corner into a darker street of old, shuttered houses. “It’s not a negotiation if only one side has a voice.”
“You got a voice. You’re usin’ it right now. And every time you look at me like you wanna stab me and kiss me at the same time. And every time you disobey me just to feel my hands on you afterwards. You screamin’ at me in six different languages, baby girl. I’m listenin’.”
She stopped walking, leaning against a snow-dusted picket fence. The wood was icy against her temple. He was right. Goddamn him, he was always right about the ugly, tangled parts of her. That was his power. He saw the need beneath the rebellion, the surrender coiled inside the defiance. He spoke its language fluently.
“Bill…”
“You cold?”
She was. She was frozen to her marrow. “Yes.”
“Go get a coffee. The all-night gas station on the west edge of town. The one with the busted sign. Be there in twenty.”
“No.”
“Not a request. You’re cold, you’re in the open, and Rab is still lurkin’. You go there, you get warm. I’ll call him off. For tonight.”
“And then what?”
“Then you get a good night’s sleep in your mouse-haunted shack. And we talk about the rest tomorrow.”
“You’re not coming?”
Another pause. Longer this time. “Do you want me to come?”
It was the first real question he’d asked. The only one that mattered. Her throat closed. She saw the cabin. The single candle. The unbearable, crushing silence. She saw him filling the doorway, blocking out the night, his blue eyes seeing everything.
“No,” she whispered.
“Okay.” He didn’t sound disappointed. He sounded like he’d expected it. “Gas station.Twenty minutes. So I know you’re safe. So I can sleep.”
He hung up.
Lo stood against the fence, the phone a dead weight in her hand. The anger was still there, but it had morphed, softened at the edges into a confused and aching fatigue. He’d given her an out. A small one. A command, but a protective one.Go get warm. Let me protect you from this one idiot I sent. It was a tiny circle of his control, and she was standing inside it, choosing to stay.
Because she was cold.
She pushed off the fence and started walking, retracing her steps towards the western outskirts. The gas station was a known landmark, a sad little oasis of fluorescence. As she walked, the town seemed to shrink, revealing its true, desolate scale. It was a place to pass through, not to root in. Her studio clients were nice, but they didn’t know her. They knew a version—the serene yoga teacher, the knowledgeable herbalist. They didn’t know the girl who could strip and clean a Glock in under a minute, the woman whose earliest memories smelled of bike oil and spilled beer, who understood the complex, unspoken hierarchy of a Clubhouse floor.
She saw the station's flickering, half-lit sign up ahead. Her pace slowed. This was compliance. A small one, but it was a thread. He’d pull it, and the whole tapestry of her resistance would start to unravel.She knew it. He knew it.
She pushed the door open, a bell jangling overhead. The heat was stifling, smelling of stale coffee and artificial cherry syrup. The clerk, a pimply kid with earbuds in, barely glanced up from his phone.
She poured a cup of black coffee, the steam thawing her face. She took it to the window, standing where she could see the empty road and the dark wall of the forest beyond. She took a sip. It was terrible. Bitter and burnt.
Her phone buzzed again.
Bill: You there?
She typed, her fingers stiff. Lo: Yes.
Bill: Good girl. Rab’s recalled.Sleep tight, Rabbit. Don’t make me send someone prettier tomorrow.
She didn’t reply. She just held the phone, watching the empty road. The silence in the gas station was different now. It wasn’t the silence of being alone. It was the silence of being watched over. Consumed. It was the silence inside the velvet-lined cage, just before the door clicked shut.
She finished the coffee, the heat spreading through her chest. Then she shoved the phone back in her pocket, pulled her hood tighter, and stepped back out into the freezing night. The walk back to the cabin was longer, the darkness deeper.Every shadow seemed deliberate. Every creak of a tree branch was a footstep.
She reached the clearing. The cabin was a black silhouette, hunched and waiting.No bike. No Rab. Just the sigh of the wind.
She stood at the edge of the trees for a long time, looking at it. Her sanctuary.Her prison. Her choice.
Finally, she walked inside. She didn’t light a candle. She just sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark, still in her jacket and wet boots, listening. Not to the woods outside, but to the silence within. And for the first time in two months, she heard it for what it was: not peace, but an echo. The echo of a voice that lived in her bones, a voice that said, in a gritty New York rasp, You hate being alone.
And she knew, with a certainty that felt like both a death sentence and a reprieve, that he was coming. Not Rab.Not tomorrow. But soon. He’d given her tonight, a courtesy, a nod to her pride. But he was coming.
Her anger sharpened her senses, honed by the cold and the coffee and the lingering fear. He was not doing this again.The cycle. The capitulation. The sweet, suffocating victory in his eyes when she finally stopped fighting.
She stood up, shucking off her jacket with a sudden, violent motion. She knelt by the cast-iron stove, groping in the darkness underneath until her fingers closed around the cracked plastic of the burner phone. She pulled it out. The screen was dark, dead.Good.
She went to the shelf, her hands finding the oversized leather-bound book in the dark. She didn’t need light. She’d seen it a hundred times. She flipped it open, roughly, to the dog-eared page. Her fingers traced the heavy paper, the dense, handwritten text she’d never allowed herself to decipher. It wasn’t hers. It was from before. But it was a tool.
She carried the book and the dead phone to the small, grimy sink. She turned on the tap, a trickle of icy well water splashing into the basin. She held the phone under it, letting the water seep into its broken guts, ensuring its silence was permanent.
Then she opened the book. With steady hands, she began to tear out pages, one by one. The sound was loud in the silent cabin—a slow, deliberate ripping. She didn’t look at the words. She crumpled each page into a loose ball and dropped it into the dry, cold belly of the stove.
She was not waiting. She was not just surviving the night. She was building a different kind of fire.
When a small pile of paper balls lay in the stove, she reached into the pocket of her discarded jacket and pulled out a book of matches from the Bend & Breathe studio.She struck one. The flame leapt, a tiny, dancing eye in the absolute blackness.
She held it over the stove, her face a mask of focused calm in the sudden light. Then she dropped it.
The paper caught with a soft, hungry whump, the flames growing quickly, licking up towards the flue, painting the cabin walls in pulsating, wild shadows. The patches on the wall seemed to move, the faces in the faded embroidery flickering to life and then disappearing into the smoke.
Lo sat back on her heels, watching the fire grow. The heat began to push back the cabin’s deep chill, spreading across her skin. She didn’t smile. But the hopeless fatigue was gone, burned away.
The fire was her answer. Not running. Not silent obedience. A fire could warm. It could also cleanse. It could send a signal.
He thought he was the only one who knew how to play a long game. He thought her rebellion was a predictable rhythm, a seasonal migration he could map.
She fed another page into the flames.
Tomorrow, she would disappear again. But not into the woods. Not as a rabbit.